Mike's Notes
My friend James Robb's article on the defence of science, open debate, and the broader context is great. I have copied it from his website.
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Last Updated
18/04/2025
How not to conduct a scientific debate: Royal Society, university
split over Matauranga Maori and science
By: James Robb
Convincing Reasons: 19 April 2022
A long-running and tetchy argument over science education in New Zealand
has polarised academics at Auckland University and shattered one of the
central institutions of science, the Royal Society. International scientific
figures have pitched in to the debate, which also concerns questions of
academic freedom, ‘cancel culture,’ and ‘decolonisation of learning’ similar
to those that are tearing apart universities in other parts of the
world.
The debate opened with a letter headed “In Defence of science”, signed by
seven prominent academics at Auckland University, published in the New
Zealand Listener magazine in July 2021. The academics opposed a recent
government report which proposed “to ensure parity for Matauranga Maori with
other bodies of knowledge credentialed by NCEA.” Matauranga Maori is
commonly defined as traditional Maori knowledge or ‘ways of knowing.’ NCEA,
the National Certificate of Educational Achievement, is the certificate of
academic achievement awarded to secondary school students.
[IMG]
The seven Auckland University academics who signed the letter to the NZ
Listener in July 2021 which opened the debate. Clockwise from top left:
Professor Kendall Clements, Professor Garth Cooper, Emeritus Professor
Michael Corballis, Professor Douglas Elliffe, Emeritus Professor John
Werry, Professor Elizabeth Rata, Emeritus Professor Robert Nola. Photos:
Auckland University website, (except for John Werry: photo Stuff media)
In the letter, the academics (who became known as the ‘Listener Seven’)
quote from a course description contained in the report, which says “It
promotes discussion and analysis of the ways in which science has been used
to support the dominance of Eurocentric views (among which, its use as a
rationale for the colonisation of Maori and the suppression of Maori
knowledge); and the notion that science is a Western European invention and
itself evidence of European dominance over Maori and other indigenous
peoples.”
This passage, write the Listener Seven, “perpetuates disturbing
misunderstandings of science emerging at all levels of education and in
science funding. These encourage mistrust of science. Science is universal,
not especially Western European… Science itself does not colonise. It has
been used to aid colonisation, as have literature and art. However, science
also provides immense good…”
The fear that the proposed approach would encourage “mistrust of science”
is at the centre of the concerns of the Listener Seven. “Science is
helping us to battle worldwide crises such as Covid, [and] global warming…
The future of our world, and our species, cannot afford mistrust of
science,” they write.
“Science is helping us to battle worldwide crises such as Covid, [and]
global warming,” the signatories to the letter warn. “The future of our
world and species cannot afford mistrust of science.”
Whether they are right or wrong, it is incontestable that the matters
raised by the ‘Listener Seven’ academics are serious issues, raised in good
faith by respected academic figures, which deserved to be widely discussed
and debated. In fact, their letter met with exactly the opposite response.
Within days the Vice-Chancellor of Auckland University, Dawn Freshwater,
publicly denounced the letter and dissociated the University from it, saying
that the letter “has caused considerable hurt and dismay among our staff,
students and alumni. While the academics are free to express their views, I
want to make it clear that they do not represent the views of the University
of Auckland,” her statement read.
(Let us note in passing that by introducing the emotional considerations of
‘hurt and dismay’ into the argument, Freshwater completely negated her nod
to freedom of expression.)
[IMG]
Auckland University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dawn Freshwater.
Photo: Auckland University
Two high-profile academics at Auckland University, Dr Siouxsie Wiles and
Professor Shaun Hendy, then initiated an open letter repudiating the
‘Listener Seven’ letter, which was signed by 2000 people, mainly academics
at New Zealand universities. In a tweet calling for support to the open
letter, Wiles also claimed that the Listener Seven letter had “caused untold
harm and hurt & points to major problems with some of our colleagues.”
Wiles is a prominent media commentator on scientific questions. She and
Hendy have been leading figures in the government’s Covid-19 response. While
this response was more akin to a Twitter pile-on than a serious debate of
the issues, it stopped short of calling for sanctions against the Listener
Seven.
[IMG]
Dr Siouxsie Wiles (L) and Professor Shaun Hendy (R)
Photo L: Elise Manahan, AU, Photo R: Dan Cook, RNZ
Pitching the controversy as a power struggle between an entrenched old
guard and enlightened younger scholars like herself, Wiles wrote an opinion
piece in Stuff media in which she claimed of the Listener Seven that “The
reason I got involved is because those professors and fellows have influence
and power over people’s careers. Astonishingly, some are now intimidating
junior colleagues with lawyer’s letters.” This claim was withdrawn after it
was found by the Media Council to be untrue. The Council said it was “of the
view that this is a most serious allegation to make, striking at the heart
of academic freedom by asserting that the Professors were trying to stifle
opposing views using lawyers’ threats. It required immediate public
correction.”
The Royal Society took the cancel campaign still further. Three of the
Listener Seven were Fellows of the Royal Society Te Aparangi, a statutory
body for the promotion of science. The Society tweeted that “The recent
suggestion by a group of academics that mātauranga Māori is not a valid
truth is utterly rejected by Royal Society Te Apārangi. The Society strongly
upholds the value of mātauranga Māori and rejects this narrow and outmoded
definition of science.” In a statement, Society president Brent
Clothier and academy executive committee chairwoman Charlotte MacDonald said
they deeply regretted “the harm [my emphasis – JR] such a misguided view
could cause.”
Prompted by complaints from some members, it launched a formal disciplinary
investigation into the three of its Fellows who signed the Listener letter.
The three (one of whom, Michael Corballis, later died of cancer) were
informed that their membership may be terminated. Neither Freshwater, nor
Wiles, nor the Royal Society explained exactly how expressing an opinion
could cause harm.
The Tertiary Education Union also threw its weight behind the cancel
campaign, stating in a letter that “members found the letter offensive,
racist, reflective of patronising, and of neo-colonial mindset.”
One of the Listener signatories, Psychology Professor Douglas Elliffe
resigned from his role as acting dean of the faculty in response to this
backlash.
Press coverage of the controversy in New Zealand was noticeable for its
discreet silence on both the issues raised by the Listener Seven and the
implications of the subsequent cancel campaign. However, news began to
circulate in the international press of the bizarre spectacle of a
prestigious scientific institution, the Royal Society, launching a punitive
investigation of its own members for engaging in a debate about science –
and moreover, in the name of opposing racism and supporting the
participation of Maori in science, preparing to expel from its ranks one of
the country’s most eminent Maori scientists: Garth Cooper, one of the
Fellows of the Royal Society targeted by the investigation, is of Ngati
Mahanga descent, and has a distinguished record of initiatives to promote
Maori health and advance the participation of Maori in science. He explains
that his objection to the statement that science is a ‘rationale for the
colonisation of Maori’ is precisely that teaching “young Māori scholars …
that science was a colonising influence of no interest to them” would
discourage their participation in science. (For a detailed description of
Cooper’s record and thinking, see this article on NZCPR by Graham
Adams.)
Columns defending the Listener Seven appeared in the Spectator, the Sunday
Times, the Daily Mail, Times Higher Education, and other international
papers. The Spectator was the first to call the investigation a
witch-hunt.
[IMG]
Internationally renowned biologists Richard Dawkins (left) and Jerry
Coyne (right) led the defence of the Listener Seven Photo L: David
Shankbone CC R: Emma Rodewald CC
Internationally renowned evolutionary biologists Jerry Coyne and Richard
Dawkins got hold of the story, and wrote scathing criticisms of the conduct
of the University and of the Royal Society. “If New Zealand’s Royal Society
won’t stand up for true science in your country who will?” Dawkins asked in
an open letter to the Royal Society. Harvard experimental psychologist
Steven Pinker also decried the cancelling of his friend Michael Corballis,
one of the Listener Seven. “If you’ve got a regime where merely voicing an
opinion gets you silenced or punished then we’ve kind of turned off the only
mechanism that we have of discovering knowledge,” he said.
Both the University and the Royal Society began to feel the heat.
And both institutions began to step back a little from the stance of
enthusiastic support for the bullying campaign that they had adopted at the
start. The AU Vice-Chancellor issued a further statement in August with
greater emphasis on freedom of expression and the statutory protections of
academic freedom. Contrary to her earlier statement, this one recognised
that “The freedom to express ideas is constrained neither by their perceived
capacity to elicit discomfort [my emphasis – JR], nor by presuppositions
concerning their veracity.”
In December 2021, the first academic voices in New Zealand began to speak
up in defence of academic freedom, and against the Royal Society’s punitive
‘investigation’ of the Listener Seven.
By this time the pressure of the international criticism had brought the
RSNZ to a state of crisis. A December 2021 statement by the Chief Executive
complained of having received “a barrage of frequently vitriolic and abusive
messages.” “We are deeply concerned at what has been playing out, as I am
sure you all are. Please be assured that Royal Society Te Apārangi is taking
the high level of local and international comment on matters related to the
letter very seriously. We are acutely aware of the potential for
significant damage to be inflicted in multiple directions, not least to
relationships and our ability to have a balanced and informed dialogue about
important questions for the future of our country… The situation has
developed to a point that is profoundly unhelpful for discussing and
addressing the issues originally raised in The Listener letter over four
months ago.”
In March 2022, the Society announced that the disciplinary investigation of
the two Fellows would not proceed. In the opinion of the initial
investigating panel, “the matters raised are of substance and merit further
constructive discussion and respectful dialogue.” The two Fellows targeted
by the investigation, Garth Cooper and Robert Nola, resigned as soon as the
decision not to proceed was announced. Nola explained his resignation by
saying that the matters raised in the Listener letter were worthy of debate,
“but none was given through the Royal Society. Its response was to
shut down dogmatically such discussion.” Since then, some seventy Fellows
have published an open letter containing a motion of no confidence in the
Academy Executive and Council of the Society for their handling of the
criticisms of the Listener Seven. The Society appears to be headed towards
implosion at its next Fellowship on 28 April.
So, at this point, the campaign to cancel the Listener Seven seems to have
met the same fate as Putin’s assault on Kyiv. The decision by the Royal
Society not to proceed with its ‘investigation’ is a welcome development.
The scientific and philosophical questions remain unresolved – in fact,
still largely unaddressed at this point – but at least a measure of
political space in which to discuss and debate them has been forced
open.
In addition to the issue of freedom of academic discussion and debate, the
working class has a great deal at stake in the scientific aspects of this
discussion – including the defence of materialist and scientific thinking
against obscurantism, and the fight against national oppression and racist
discrimination.
But on the scientific and philosophical questions, neither of the two
contending poles of opinion gives an adequate lead. The following are my
thoughts on some of the points raised by the Listener Seven, and their
supporters and detractors.
The first thing to note is that the concerns of the Listener Seven are at
least partly justified: it is clear that under the banner of equal status
for matauranga Maori, fundamentally anti-scientific notions are being
introduced into the science curriculum.
We find the following in the NCEA Chemistry curriculum website, for
example: “Mauri is present in all matter. All particles have their own mauri
and presence as part of a larger whole, for example within a molecule,
polymer, salt, or metal. When matter is broken into smaller particles each
particle remains as part of the taiao [environment – JR], for example when a
substance is burnt or dissolved the particles remain, with their own mauri.
They do not just disappear.”
[IMG]
Screenshot from Ministry of Education website explaining changes to NCEA
Note added March 2023: this statement no longer appears on the Ministry
Curriculum website. See the update footnote at the end of the article.
Mauri is a Maori term. The website contains a Glossary which defines mauri
as “The vital essence, life force of everything: be it a physical object,
living thing or ecosystem. In Chemistry and Biology, mauri refers to the
health and life-sustaining capacity of the taiao, on biological, physical,
and chemical levels.”
Now, it is fundamentally unscientific to attribute ‘vital essence’ or ‘life
force’ to all matter. Life is a particular form of motion of matter which is
only present in living things. While life may ultimately be explainable in
terms of complex chemical processes, life cannot be reduced to those
chemical processes; nor do all chemical processes constitute life. Life has
its own laws of motion. This is why biology, the study of living things, is
not simply a branch of chemistry. To blur the distinction between chemical
and biological forms of motion in nature can only obstruct the study of both
disciplines, and of the points of connection between them.
The objection might be raised that my conception of mauri is too narrow,
that if we translate the term mauri as ‘energy’ or ‘essence’ the curriculum
statements can be reconciled with modern science. But I am using the
definition given on the curriculum website itself.
However, this problem must be kept in proportion. It is by no means the
only pathway by which anti-scientific ideas find their way into science
teaching; it is far from the only form that the degeneration of scientific
thinking takes. I doubt very much that it is the main one. I believe the
Listener Seven’s concerns about the retreat from scientific thinking both in
education and in society in general are fully justified. But this retreat
has material, not merely ideological, roots. Matauranga Maori may be one of
the forms it takes, but it is not the source of the backsliding.
Nor does the recognition of matauranga Maori constitute a new wave of
Creationism, as it is often presented. Dawkins and some of the other
defenders of the Listener Seven present the push for “Equal status for
mātauranga Māori in NCEA” as a kind of re-run of the creationists’ campaign
for ‘equal time’ with evolutionary biology in the US in the 1980s. As
Dawkins puts it, “Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous
bollocks.”
The long-running creationist campaign explicitly seeks to ban or restrict
the teaching of evolution. There is no such anti-scientific purpose at work
in the move to raise the status of matauranga Maori
This parallel with the religion-driven creationist drive is false. The
creationist campaign of the 1980s was explicitly aimed at denying and
discrediting the established scientific fact of biological evolution. The
claim for ‘equal time’ was in effect a demand to ban the teaching of
evolution other than on terms dictated by the creationists themselves. It
was in continuity with a long history of church-instigated legal attacks on
the teaching of evolution in US schools, going back to the infamous
Tennessee ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ of 1925, and earlier. Equal status for
matauranga Maori implies no such restrictions or obstacles to teaching
scientific fact.
“But it is not science,” the Listener Seven conclude their letter. Taken as
a whole, of course matauranga Maori is not science – any more than all of
French literature, or all of German philosophy, or British economics is
science. That is simply not the issue. In order to get a useful answer,
first we have to pose the issue correctly.
Matauranga Maori is the cultural heritage of a people. It includes elements
of scientific knowledge, gained through scientific method – careful
observations of nature, formation of hypotheses, and testing and
verification of those hypotheses. It also includes mythology, genealogy,
songs, ritual practices, proverbs, religious and magical beliefs, and more.
In mātauranga Maori these elements are all bound closely together – and in a
society resting on oral traditions it could not have been otherwise.
To take an example from the purest mythology: many people in New Zealand
are familiar with the myth of the demigod Maui hauling up a giant fish which
became the North Island of New Zealand, and the place-names associated with
it (like Te Upoko o te Ika, the head of the fish, the name for the
Wellington region.) Is there anything in this myth beyond an imaginative
story about magic fish-hooks, envy, fear, greed, and the human tendency for
destruction? There is, most certainly. In addition to those things, this
story is a form of knowledge of the geography of the North Island. Before
this story could be told, Maori would have had to circumnavigate the island
often enough, and make sufficiently close and accurate observations of the
coastline to be able to determine both the overall shape of the island, with
its two wings like a stingray (Taranaki and Te Tai Rawhiti), a narrow ‘tail’
pointing northwest (Te Tai Tokerau), and the rugged mountains ranged like a
dorsal fin down its interior – all of which are described in the story. In a
culture which had no means of representing such knowledge graphically or in
writing, this mythical story provided a repository for important scientific
knowledge, and a means by which this knowledge was transmitted to later
generations.
The scientific elements in matauranga Maori should be recognised and
studied. It is perfectly appropriate to study those scientific elements in a
science class, while disregarding the rest (or at least, while studying the
non-scientific aspects outside of the science class). We do this all the
time in science education. When, for example, we study Newton’s laws of
motion in a science class, we generally disregard Newton’s dabblings in
alchemy and the occult, and his religiosity. Should Newton’s whole life’s
work be considered “science” or “not science”? To put the question more
concretely: Does anyone worry, when the curriculum mandates teaching
Newton’s laws of motion, that students will also be required to learn that
the cure for plague is powdered toad’s vomit, as Newton believed? And if
not, then what is the basis for the fears (or rather, sneers) in the
‘defence of science’ posted by Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins and others, that
students may be required to learn that rain is the tears of
Papatuanuku?
Isaac Newton 1642-1727 made many outstanding contributions to scientific
knowledge, including the Laws of Motion which are still taught in schools
today. He also undertook extensive alchemical and occult studies in secret,
searching for the philosopher’s stone, a material believed to be able to
turn base metals into gold. Science education selects his scientific ideas
and disregards the rest – there is no reason why it can’t do the same with
matauranga Maori.
Professors Coyne and Dawkins have performed a very useful service in
bringing the bullying cancel campaign against the Listener Seven to wider
scrutiny. Their efforts were key to defeating it. Their arguments in defence
of science, however, are not so useful.
Jerry Coyne seems particularly troubled to discount traditional Polynesian
navigation, which he says is “often touted as a form of indigenous
‘science’.” Having strongly asserted that science is what enables human
beings to accomplish feats such as taking human beings to the moon and back,
he is hard-pressed to explain the accomplishments of Polynesian navigation
as anything other than feats of science.
A thousand years ago, while European mariners still clung closely to the
coastlines and regarded the open ocean with dread, Polynesian science
enabled their navigators to range across the vast expanse of the Pacific
Ocean, to find within that vastness tiny specks of land, islands so low they
disappear below the horizon at a distance of a few kilometres, and to make
return journeys between these islands. In his moment of greatest generosity
towards matauranga Maori, Coyne concedes that indigenous cultures’ knowledge
of nature gained through ‘trial and error’ methods is ‘science construed
broadly’. But then he dismisses the Polynesian navigation techniques as
something greatly inferior to real science, on the basis that they were
built on random wanderings. “So yes, ‘trial and error’ is science,” he
writes, “but it seems to me that modern science involves far more than trial
and error, but rests more frequently on testing a priori hypotheses…
[Polynesian navigation techniques] couldn’t have developed, I think, as an a
priori set of hypotheses used to get from place A to place B. Rather, we
must remember all the voyagers who didn’t make it compared to those who
did.”
[IMG]
Left: Star compass used by master navigator Mau Piailug to train
traditional navigators in Caroline islands, showing Wuliwulifasmughet
(Polaris) at top, and rising and setting positions of other stars and
constellations. Marigaht is Matariki/Pleiades, Luubw is the Southern Cross
at rising or setting, Wuliwuliluubw is the same constellation in upright
position.
Right: The turquoise colour of shallow water in a lagoon can reflect on
the undersides of clouds. Polynesian navigators could use this knowledge
to find islands that were below the horizon.
Should we then also remember the many millions of human beings who died of
curable diseases along the winding road to a scientific understanding of
disease, and count these millions as proof that medical science is inferior
to real science?
But more to the point, does Coyne really believe that the Polynesians, who
lived on small islands and took their sustenance from the sea, actually set
out on these voyages without a single hunch informing their decisions,
testing no hypotheses other than random guesses? There is of course no
written record of the development of their science, but why is it so
inconceivable to Coyne that they began with hypotheses such as this:
“Gannets return to their nests on land every night. If we follow the
direction of the gannet in the evening, we should find land” Or perhaps this
one: “There are often clouds hanging over the mountains on our island when
the rest of the sky is clear. Let us see if that solitary cloud on the
horizon indicates a mountain beneath it, out of sight below the horizon.”
Even the most cursory familiarity with traditional Polynesian navigation
science demonstrates that it is far more sophisticated than simple ‘trial
and error.’
Here Coyne not only demonstrates his ignorance of Polynesian navigation
science, but betrays precisely the Eurocentric assumptions and prejudices of
which the Listener Seven are unfairly accused. Coyne’s article is not a
defence of scientific thinking, but of established scientific authority.
These two things are not the same, as we shall see.
“Science itself does not colonise,” write the Listener Seven. On this point
I generally agree, though in the letter the thought is incompletely
developed, and is somewhat contradicted by their subsequent assertion that
science “also provides immense good.”
Science is not an independent force for good or bad. Science does not hover
above society, detached from it; rather, it is a tool in the hands of human
beings. Through understanding the laws of nature and acting in accord with
them, those in possession of scientific knowledge magnify their conscious
power over nature. It is the human beings, or more precisely, classes, that
use science for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – for antibiotics and for nuclear weaponry,
for launching billionaires into space, for ending pandemics and for starting
them, for accelerating and for mitigating the effects of climate
change.
In a class-divided society, scientific knowledge also increases the power
of its possessors over other human beings. For science, like all forms of
culture in class society, is largely monopolised by the ruling class and
their supporting middle layers. In the hands of a rapacious capitalist
class, driven by the competitive drive for self-enrichment, science enhances
their capacity for plunder of nature, for squeezing the maximum labour out
of other human beings, for oppression and exploitation of all kinds.
“Science” by itself is responsible for neither the horrors of nuclear
weapons nor the benefits of vaccination against disease. Left, a mushroom
cloud forms over Nagasaki, Japan after the dropping of the second atomic
bomb. Photo: Life images Right, pop-up Covid vaccination clinic, Auckland.
Photo: Sylvie Whinray, New Zealand Herald
On the other hand, in the hands of the producing classes, the working class
and the small farmers, science is an essential tool in their efforts to
build a society free from exploitation and national and colonial oppression,
a society no longer at war with nature. This is one reason the working class
has such an important stake in defending scientific thinking and practice.
This is also why it is in the interest of the whole working class to support
every initiative that will increase equality of access to scientific
education and entry into the scientific professions for Maori and other
oppressed nationalities. The best of the Maori scholars will be attracted to
scientific studies, not by prettying up the past, but by the opportunity to
use science to bury the brutal past, and the oppressive social relations in
the present that it bequeathed.
But the working class has no interest in defending the bourgeois
institutions of science – not the Royal Society, not the private research
institutes and laboratories attached to capitalist corporations, not even
the universities. These institutions were all created by the capitalist
class, they serve that class above all, and they are headed for oblivion
along with the political rule of that class – just as, in an earlier epoch,
the monasteries and cathedral schools, the foremost scientific institutions
of feudal times, faded into obscurity with the extinction of the feudal
landlord class.
Siouxsie Wiles and the signatories of the “Open Letter” appear to
consciously and tendentiously conflate scientific method with the
institutions of science when they assert that “the Professors claim that
‘science itself does not colonise,’ ignoring the fact that colonisation,
racism, misogyny, and eugenics have each been championed by scientists
wielding a self-declared monopoly on universal knowledge. And while the
Professors describe science as ‘universal’, they fail to acknowledge that
science has long excluded indigenous peoples from participation.”
In fact, the Listener Seven did not ignore the way science had been used in
these oppressive ways – on the contrary, their letter specifically mentioned
the way it had been used in the service of colonisation. It is also very
clear in the letter that their claim for the universality of science relates
to scientific method and knowledge – they make no claim that the
institutions of science are free from discrimination. Garth Cooper’s thirty
year record of promoting Maori participation in science prove that he at
least is well aware of this problem.
So where does mistrust of science come from, and how can it be overcome?
The Wiles-Hendy ‘Open Letter‘ offers this answer: “We believe that mistrust
in science stems from science’s ongoing role in perpetuating ‘scientific’
racism, justifying colonisation, and continuing support of systems that
create injustice. There can be no trust in science without robust
self-reflection by the science community and an active commitment to
change.”
The problem with this solution is that it has already happened: ‘robust
self-reflection’ has already placed those with ‘an active commitment to
change’ fully in charge of the universities, Royal Society, and Ministry of
Education – as the overwhelming response to the Listener Seven makes clear
beyond doubt. And yet, mistrust of science continues to grow. (The fact that
the Seven felt they had to publish their criticisms in a letter to The
Listener, a magazine entirely outside of science and education, demonstrates
how little they are in control of these institutions.)
Both sides of this debate see reforming the educational institutions in
various ways as the path to restoring the authority of science. But the
problem is both deeper and broader than that.
“Mistrust of science” is above all mistrust of the institutions of science;
it is closely related to the growing mistrust of the political institutions
of capitalist society, which lean on ‘science’ to bolster their authority.
No amount of exhortation to ‘trust the science’ can overcome it. For
mistrust of these institutions is not entirely lacking in
justification.
Modern science arose in tandem with capitalism. In the epoch of mercantile
capitalism, the capitalist class nurtured science in order to broaden its
economic activities; in the epoch of industrial capitalism, it continued to
foster science because the constant revolutionising of the productive
technology is a necessary feature of the capitalist mode of production. This
led to a flowering of scientific thought unmatched in history, in which
science was emancipated from its religious and superstitious entanglements.
For the first time in more than a thousand years, materialist philosophy –
the assertion that a material world exists independent of human perception,
is lawful and knowable, and is the rock against which all human knowledge
must be tested – prevailed over its idealist opposite. Science rested firmly
on the empirical method – the test of objective reality – for
verification.
[IMG]
Polio vaccination campaign 1955. As long as scientific advance seemed to
result in improvements in standards of living, confidence in science
remained high. The decline of capitalist economy erodes that confidence
today. Photo: AP
The working class grew in numbers and strength, and through their
struggles, won a share of the benefits of scientific advance – in improved
health and longevity, cheaper prices for the necessities of life, broader
access to scientific education, and in other ways. So long as scientific
advances seemed to result in improvements in standards of living, confidence
in science remained high.
But in the epoch of monopoly capitalism, scientific thinking and practice
increasingly becomes an obstacle, both to capitalist profit-making and to
capitalist political rule. Monopoly profits depend less on technical
advance; the anti-competitive practices of monopolies tend to actively
suppress technical innovation. As the economic morass of capitalism deepens,
science is no longer synonymous with social progress. Capitalist political
rule increasingly rests on the propagation of illusions, even as it calls on
‘science’ to enhance its authority.
The scientific corruption on a vast scale described by Ben Goldacre in his
book Bad Pharma is but one small example – corruption of evidence, of
scientific methods, of academic institutions, of government regulators, of
individual people and their morality – as the drug monopolies bring their
colossal economic weight to bear on the process of testing and marketing
drugs. Objective scientific testing is frequently an impediment to their
profit-making.
[IMG]
Anti-vaccine mandate protest in Wellington November 9 2021. Such protests
express suspicion towards political institutions, including the science
they call on to bolster their political authority. Photo: Hagen Hopkins
And this is only one form the recoil from science takes. As the rate of
profit in industry continues to fall, the source of capitalist profit shifts
towards monopoly price-gouging, investment shifts from industrial production
towards unproductive speculations in real estate, cryptocurrency trading,
trading in stocks and bonds and fictitious values, and other forms of
gambling that create no new value. This produces a corresponding shift in
bourgeois thinking and culture – away from scientific investigation of the
real material world, towards idle speculations and reactionary fantasies of
all kinds, including conspiracy theories. The universities themselves engage
in the production of fictitious values – in their case, degrees and
diplomas, entitlements to a privileged income which have in many cases very
questionable connection to any socially useful skills. In all these ways,
real science becomes less and less useful to the capitalist class.
This is the material basis of the contemporary erosion of scientific
thinking. This, not matauranga Maori, is the source of anti-scientific
tendency about which the Listener Seven rightly sound the alarm.
The fact that a prominent ‘science populariser,’ backed by the
vice-chancellor at the country’s largest university, and by the most
prestigious organisation for the promotion of science, can lead 2000 fellow
academics in a campaign of denunciation of a group of scientists with an
opposing view, rather than engaging in a scientific debate; their impulse to
appeal to feelings of “harm and hurt” and their corresponding reluctance to
appeal to objective evidence and engage in debate – these are rather stark
indications of just how far the reaction against scientific thinking has
gone, and how widespread and ingrained it has become in the institutions of
higher learning.
When Richard Dawkins asks, “If the Royal Society will not defend science,
then who will?” my answer is this: at the present stage of history, the
Royal Society is incapable of defending science; it is doomed to be
sidelined by the further progress of science. But the working class of the
world will, in the course of its struggle to overthrow capitalist
bestiality, forge new institutions of science and learning, institutions
allied to the needs of the working class and arising out of its
organisations and armies of production, just as the early universities arose
out of the guilds of the nascent bourgeoisie.
When that happens, it will be the first time in human history that the
labouring classes fully take possession of science. This circumstance alone
will produce a scientific renaissance that will make today’s modern science
look like the blind fumblings of the alchemists in comparison.
Note added March 2023:
The visit of Richard Dawkins to New Zealand in February 2023 stimulated
renewed interest in this debate. I happened to check the quote mentioned
above from the draft Chemistry curriculum online where the draft had “Mauri
is present in all matter. All particles have their own mauri and presence as
part of a larger whole” and found that …this “Big Idea” had disappeared! The
Ministry appears to have very quietly accepted that at least a part of the
argument put forward by the Listener Seven was valid, and amended their
draft accordingly, but without announcing, let alone explaining the reasons
for the change, and without, of course, recognising that they were in error
in the first instance. (I am told that the ‘Mauri is present in all matter’
idea is still there in many draft lesson plans etc on the site). This
underhand manner of proceeding strikes me as thoroughly dishonest and
cowardly, and contrary to the norms of scientific debate.
